Acting as a personal assistant for my professor.

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John Stamos

5/9/04

EDUC-388

UTA Final Assessment Paper

        My responsibilities as a UTA for Professor Coughlin’s Introduction to Microeconomics class was to be his personal assistant for things related to the class where I could help him, especially in computer-related tasks. The task Professor Coughlin entrusted to me at the start of the semester was simply to set up and maintain the course website and to hold office hours. My office hours were held 12:30-1:30pm every Tuesday and Thursday in the student lounge of Tydings, room 1128, and I only cancelled them once or twice during the entire semester due to other responsibilities. No students ever showed up to my office hours, and my task was only to announce that they were available on the website and syllabus, and to always be prepared with the textbook and a knowledge of the chapter, in case somebody came. Every day I held office hours with the colorful Microeconomics textbook on the desk before me.

To get me acquainted with the content of the class and its direction, as well as to receive my input and assistance, Professor Coughlin involved me in the preparation of the course syllabus. We sat down one-on-one and looked over the syllabus line by line over the winter break, before Professor Coughlin had been able to contact any of the graduate teaching assistants. In doing this, we discussed many aspects of the class, including exam schedule and content. I developed my listening skills-listening to what the Professor wanted and what his thinking patterns were like, and also my own communications skills-to express what something might be like for an undergraduate. For example, I suggested that exams reflect the assigned homework as well as material in the textbook and lecture, because it would provide more incentive to do the homework, and the professor agreed to incorporate this into the syllabus. I then set up the website with links to the syllabus, the exam schedule, exam information for each of the three exams and the make-ups, homework assignments, the book’s online study site, a list of tutors for fire as well as the Economic Association of Maryland (EAM)’s free tutoring service, the econ advising office & economic department, and economics jokes. When this was substantively completed (very early in the semester) my responsibilities began to change in nature.

        In addition to adding announcements, new homework assignments, homework solutions, new exam information, and grades, on the website, as well as hold office hours, I also helped Professor Coughlin to prepare his lectures by looking over the slides together and discussing them. All this was done in one-on-one meetings. At first, I suggested a meeting day of Wednesday at 10 am, because it was the day between his lectures, which were on Tuesday and Thursday, between my office hours, and also the middle of the week. This turned out to be very convenient. However, Professor Coughlin progressively asked me to revise more and more slides per chapter as we got into the semester. After preparing the revised slides for Chapter 5, I was apprehensive about what he would think of them, even though we had discussed the revisions in detail previously, so instead of giving him my work, I decided to ask him if he wanted to go over the finished slides together to make sure he liked them. This turned out to be a good idea because, after looking at the new slides, he decided he wanted to make some further changes before using them in lecture. We ended up doing the same thing for all futures slides, and also when I prepared the homework assignments. He would give a draft of an old homework assignment we had used and we would discuss initial revisions; afterwards I would show it to him again, and he would tell me any final revisions he wanted to make. As a result, we often ended up meeting two or three times a week. This usually happened during my office hours. Midway through the semester, Professor Coughlin wanted me to prepare a CGI script that would allow students to see their individual assignment grade for each assignment and overall class grade by typing in the last five digits of their social security number into a page on the website. The head graduate discussion leader had used something like this in a previous class and it worked well. I had never done CGI before but quickly learned how. After this, I was responsible for transforming the raw grade data from excel into the CGI webpage, and updating the students’ grades periodically.

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        Overall, the skills involved in various aspects of my UTA experience were not closely tailored to teaching, and are different from skills reflecting the aspects of classroom teaching, though not in planning teaching. They included planning course events (exams, homework), communicating, listening, organizing a variety of tasks, and working on the computer with Word, Excel, HTML, and CGI. I filled in for a graduate TA on the first week of class and taught a section of the book, and this involved a different kind of communication. I did not just lecture the material but asked questions leading some of the ...

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